The War Works Hard Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Saadi Simawe

  ONE. THE WAR WORKS HARD (2004)

  Bag of Bones

  Shoemaker

  The War Works Hard

  The Game

  The Prisoner

  A Drop of Water

  Inanna

  An Urgent Call

  Non-Military Statements

  Between Two Wars

  Tough Rose

  The Jewel

  A Voice

  Travel Agency

  O

  Santa Claus

  Buzz

  Crashed Acts

  Snowstorm

  To Any Other Place

  I Was In A Hurry

  America

  Silent Movie

  Laheeb and the City

  The Rocking Chair

  Traces

  The Foreigner

  Five Minutes

  TWO. FROM ALMOST MUSIC (1997)

  The Cup

  The Resonance

  The Artist Child

  The Departure of Friends

  A Tombstone

  The Theory of Absence

  Nothing Here is Enough

  What’s New?

  The Pomegranate Seeds

  With One Look From Him

  An Orange

  THREE. FROM THE PSALMS OF ABSENCE (1993)

  Behind the Glass

  The Nun

  The New Year

  Transformations of the Child and the Moon

  The Chaldean’s Ruins

  The Shadow of a Tear

  Pronouns

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  DUNYA MIKHAIL: A POETIC VISION OUT OF THE IRAQUI ASHES

  I first became aware of Dunya Mikhail in Miriam Cooke’s 1996 volume titled Women and the War Story, which is a study of Arab women writers’ response to war in Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. In her discussion of Mikhail’s Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (1995), Cooke discerned and analyzed the book’s double condemnation of the two warring sides as equally detrimental to the humanity of their people and the humanity of their enemy. Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was published in Baghdad while the author was still living there, but the Iraqi fascist authorities were not initially able to identify its anti-war spirit. However, in the next few months, Mikhail would become terrified by increasingly systematic harassment from the regime until eventually, like most Iraqi writers, she could no longer keep her promise to stay in her country and thus fled first to Jordan and then to the United States.

  Dunya Mikhail speaks and writes in three languages. A member of the Iraqi Christian minority, her native languages are both Aramaic (the ancient language of the pre-Islamic indigenous Iraqi Christians) and Arabic. English is her third language, which she learned in Iraqi high school, and college. Once in the U.S., Mikhail pursued her higher education and earned in 2001 an M.A. in Arabic from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Wayne State University. Upon completion of her graduate work, she has been devoted to what she enjoys most: teaching Arabic.

  Mikhail has impressively renovated the genre of the war poem in modern Arabic poetry by boldly introducing new techniques with a new vision. Instead of employing slogans and dead metaphors and political clichés that have blunted much of modern Arabic poetry, Mikhail writes about devastating successive wars within and against her country with a childlike intimacy and vulnerable sensibility. Her imagination is so immense that it embraces and synthesizes layers of literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology, to Biblical and Qur’anic poetics, to the latest techniques of Western modernism.

  Since the mid-1980s, Mikhail has published five volumes of poetry. In all five volumes, war and fascism are crucial themes that inform her poetic vision. The subversive, cleareyed speaker persistently unmasks the official glorification of war by trenchantly highlighting the shattered humanity among the rubble and the ruins. I read these volumes with such an intense mixture of pleasure and pain that I wanted to have some of the poems translated into English for an anthology of modern Iraqi poetry I was editing, Iraqi Poetry Today. Mikhail’s poetic celebration of the human versus the debilitating ideological earned her the prestigious Human Rights Watch Award for Freedom of Writing in 2001.

  The most striking aspect of Dunya Mikhail’s poetry is its unique ability to surprise the reader’s imagination and sensibility. An exhilarating ability to restore our pristine awe in our encounter with the things in the universe lies, it seems to me, in Mikhail’s magical, childlike vision of the world, including her innovative rendition of the Arabic language. She plays with words as a child plays with countless colored toys that assume a fantastic life of their own in the child’s imagination. That magical life of words, liberated from their prosaic connotations, sends shocks of guilt for what humans in war and oppression have done to each other, and pleasure and poignancy for the beauty of the universe. In most of the poems in this volume, the speaker seems as vulnerable and as subversive as the child in the famous tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” who shames us into remembering our lost innocence and courage.

  The poems in The War Works Hard were written, though not necessarily published, between 1985 and 2004, the darkest years in the history of Iraq and the period that witnessed the climax of American intervention that began in 1963 when the Baath party was brought to power by a U.S.-backed military coup. Saddam was a young officer at the time. Thus to many Iraqis, the American war against Iraq actually started on February 8, 1963 when the Baath junta, aided by U.S. intelligence from Kuwait, took over Baghdad. During the first two days of battle, more than 30,000 Iraqis who fiercely resisted the fascist coup were massacred. Traditional Iraqi prisons ran out of space, and schools, nurseries, and stadiums were turned into prisons and chambers for the most sophisticated torture methods with tools imported from the West.

  Born in 1965, at the juncture of the most atrocious campaign the Baath party waged to trounce the smallest pockets of popular resistance, Dunya Mikhail’s imagination was saturated with horror stories of imprisonment, torture, death, disappearances, massacres, and rape; she was surrounded by uprootedness and endless wars. Although it is almost impossible to historicize pain and fear because they tend to overawe consciousness as cosmic and metaphysical, chronologically speaking, the poetry in this volume is divided into three overlapping periods: a) the most recent poems, the ones written after the fall of Saddam Hussein such as “Bag of Bones,” “Inanna,” and “An Urgent Call” b) poems written after the poet’s migration to the U.S. in 1996, such as “America,” “Snowstorm,” “Shoemaker,” “The Jewel,” “A Voice,” “Travel Agency,” “Buzz,” “Crashed Acts,” “I was in a Hurry,” “The Rocking Chair,” “Traces,” “The Foreigner,” and “Five Minutes” c) poems written in Baghdad during the Iraq-Iran war (1980–1988), the Gulf war of 1991, and the genocidal sanctions. Among these are “Between Two Wars,” “Santa Claus,” “To Any Other Place,” and all the poems selected from Almost Music (1997) and Psalms of Absence (1993). It is significant that the volume opens with “Bag of Bones,” a poem about the dead in a mass grave, those just “liberated” after the fall of the dictator, who never cared to give “death certificates.” The poem, while lamenting the erasure-to-the-bone of identities, attempts, through Iraqi mothers and lovers searching for their loved ones, to restore, by sheer power of love, a sense of humanity to the bones and skulls.

  Evidently, Mikhail’s vision, innovative in the Arabic literary tradition, requires fresh poetics. Thus, in her poems, the Arabic language is liberated from traditional clichés of idiom and of style; and the classical metrical patterns, which have long fallen into monotony, are re-tuned into new intimate rhythms. Dead metaphors are resurrected and transformed i
nto delicate, intimate, colorful verbal butterflies. For any reader familiar with the Arabic poetic tradition and sensibility, Mikhail’s poems are refreshing and uplifting. Her vision, for instance, in the title poem, “The War Works Hard,” is unparalleled in its quiet and therefore more effective subversion of war ideologies, in which the staunchest warmonger usually hides behind the thickest rhetoric of peace and humanity. In a poetic tradition that views the author as the absolute source of meaning, the whispering irony and the vulnerability of the speaker in this poem constitute an inspiring break from the monomaniacal tyranny—a break that opens space for the readers to share in pondering these uncanny images:

  The war continues working, day and night.

  It inspires tyrants

  to deliver long speeches,

  awards medals to the generals

  and themes to poets.

  It contributes to the industry

  of artificial limbs,

  provides food for flies,

  adds pages to the history books,

  achieves equality

  between killer and killed

  The key to the power of the poem is its speaker’s ironic stance and the childlike matter-of-fact images. Although this poem was written in Baghdad, with the Iraq-Iran war and 1991 Gulf war in mind, the poet was not able to publish it in Arabic until she left Iraq.

  The capability of the poet to step out of her culture and language evidently endows her with a divine perspective that is both cruelly objective and immensely compassionate. From that alien distance she looks at things and humans as they interact, and can depict them as toys. Such an absurdity of human actions in war seems to saturate Mikhail’s poetry with two overlapping layers of emotions: sadness and incredulity. Sadness because the world for the child speaker is not fun; incredulity because the only safe playground left for the child in a war zone is to mentally transform insensitive humans into toys. It is revealing that Mikhail, in one of her statements on poetry, views poetry as play, a complex game like chess, with all the characters being fated by the designated rules of engagement and the imagination of the players. Significantly, one of the poems in the collection is titled “Game,” which depicts a game of chess wherein the speaker pities not only pawns, but also the players, who are ultimately controlled by irrational gods:

  He is a poor player

  moved by an empty life

  without black or white.

  It is a poor life

  moved by a bewildered god

  who once tried to play with clay.

  If the creator of the universe is “bewildered,” human rationality, reasoning, civilization, religion, history all become as gratuitous as the mosquito’s life in Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies.”

  Frequently in world literature when immense absurdity collides with human consciousness, the usual human reaction is a mixture of sardonic laughter and sorrow, not unlike black humor in American literature. In Mikhail’s delicate, highly sensitive poetry there is a jarring streak of blackness. This blend of harshness and sensitivity is simultaneously pleasing and unsettling, aggravating our sense of the familiar:

  I thank everyone I don’t love.

  They don’t cause me heartache;

  they don’t make me write long letters;

  they don’t disturb my dreams.

  I don’t await them anxiously;

  I don’t read their horoscopes in magazines;

  I don’t dial their numbers;

  I don’t think of them.

  I thank them a lot.

  They don’t turn my life upside down.

  By employing fresh idioms and phrases to express her unusual, defamiliarizing view of the world, Mikhail liberates our thoughts and feelings from the stringency of fossilized everyday language. And I am equally moved by her poetry in Arabic and in Elizabeth Winslow’s intuitive and elegant translations that facilitate the full passage of this poetry into English without significant loss of its Iraqi-Arabic symbolic order.

  Early in 1999, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye introduced me to Elizabeth Winslow as a good translator from the Arabic. She consulted with me on her translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Shuqair. I was so impressed with her perceptive understanding of the language and the culture of the Arabs that I invited her to contribute to Iraqi Poetry Today, encouraging her to translate some poems by Mikhail. It was a thrilling experience. Winslow was deeply moved by Mikhail’s poetry, which became a kind of muse for her translations. From her I learned that proficiency in two languages is not enough to produce the best translations; the translator must not only fall in love with the text, but also have the irresistible urge to possess the text by rewriting it into her native language. The translated work, even if it is done by the same author, is a product of two creative minds.

  As a teacher of English literature, I think Mikhail’s poetry, in its wittiness and ingenuity, its playfulness and stimulating vision of the world, might remind many readers of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and some of the metaphysical qualities of John Donne’s poetry, particularly the adroit conceits from the sciences. Her “Theory of Absence,” in which a geometrical theorem becomes a metaphor for love, resembles in its inventiveness, Donne’s powerful use of the compass as an extended metaphor in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” Mikhail’s lexical austerity, on the one hand, is reminiscent of Dickinson’s suggestive elliptical poetics, and on the other hand recalls the traditional Sufi dictum: “The wider the vision, the smaller the sentence becomes.”

  —Saadi Simawe

  ONE

  THE WAR WORKS HARD

  (2004)

  Bag of Bones

  What good luck!

  She has found his bones.

  The skull is also in the bag

  the bag in her hand

  like all other bags

  in all other trembling hands.

  His bones, like thousands of bones

  in the mass graveyard,

  his skull, not like any other skull.

  Two eyes or holes

  with which he saw too much,

  two ears

  with which he listened to music

  that told his own story,

  a nose

  that never knew clean air,

  a mouth, open like a chasm,

  was not like that when he kissed her

  there, quietly,

  not in this place

  noisy with skulls and bones and dust

  dug up with questions:

  What does it mean to die all this death

  in a place where the darkness plays all this silence?

  What does it mean to meet your loved ones now

  with all of these hollow places?

  To give back to your mother

  on the occasion of death

  a handful of bones

  she had given to you

  on the occasion of birth?

  To depart without death or birth certificates

  because the dictator does not give receipts

  when he takes your life?

  The dictator has a heart, too,

  a balloon that never pops.

  He has a skull, too, a huge one

  not like any other skull.

  It solved by itself a math problem

  that multiplied the one death by millions

  to equal homeland.

  The dictator is the director of a great tragedy.

  He has an audience, too,

  an audience that claps

  until the bones begin to rattle—

  the bones in the bags,

  the full bag finally in her hand,

  unlike her disappointed neighbor

  who has not yet found her own.

  Shoemaker

  A skillful shoemaker

  throughout his life

  has pounded the nails

  and smoothed the leather

  for a variety of feet:

  feet that flee

  feet that kick

&n
bsp; feet that plunge

  feet that pursue

  feet that run

  feet that trample

  feet that collapse

  feet that jump

  feet that trip

  feet that are still

  feet that tremble

  feet that dance

  feet that return…

  Life is a handful of nails

  in the hand of a shoemaker.

  The War Works Hard

  How magnificent the war is!

  How eager

  and efficient!

  Early in the morning,

  it wakes up the sirens

  and dispatches ambulances

  to various places,

  swings corpses through the air,

  rolls stretchers to the wounded,

  summons rain

  from the eyes of mothers,

  digs into the earth

  dislodging many things

  from under the ruins…

  Some are lifeless and glistening,

  others are pale and still throbbing…

  It produces the most questions

  in the minds of children,

  entertains the gods

  by shooting fireworks and missiles

  into the sky,

  sows mines in the fields

  and reaps punctures and blisters,

  urges families to emigrate,

  stands beside the clergymen

  as they curse the devil

  (poor devil, he remains

  with one hand in the searing fire)…

  The war continues working, day and night.

  It inspires tyrants

  to deliver long speeches,

  awards medals to generals

  and themes to poets.

  It contributes to the industry

  of artificial limbs,

  provides food for flies,

  adds pages to the history books,

  achieves equality

  between killer and killed,

  teaches lovers to write letters,

  accustoms young women to waiting,

  fills the newspapers

  with articles and pictures,

  builds new houses

  for the orphans,

  invigorates the coffin makers,

  gives grave diggers